Farm Guide

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Revision as of 19:21, 19 November 2008

The farm machines are a set of 14 rack mounted servers in the CSAIL machine room, available for experiments. In November 2008, these machines were upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10.

Important Packages

• am-utils: used for amd to automount NFS. At some point we might want to migrate to autofs, the in-kernel implementation.
• g++: depends on GCC
• gcc-4.2: for compiling older C code

Hardware Details

farm1-4

• Dell PowerEdge 650
• 2x Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz
• 2 GB RAM
• 2x 120 GB disks
• 2x Intel e1000 gigabit Ethernet (eth0 connected)
• BIOS: Revision A01

farm5-15

• Dell PowerEdge SC1420
• 2x Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.20GHz (with Hyperthreading: 4 virtual CPUs)
• 2 GB RAM
• 2x 160 GB disks
• 2x Intel e1000 gigabit Ethernet (eth0 connected)
• BIOS: Revision A03

Installing Ubuntu Server

Installing Ubuntu on these machines is relatively straightforward.

1. Grab the Ubuntu Server CD from the Media Lab Ubuntu Mirror
2. (Optional): I put Ubuntu on a USB key, instead of on a CD, by following the "flexible" directions in the Ubuntu install guide.
3. Reboot. (Optional): For the USB key: Press F2 to enter bios; change Hard Drive boot order to put USB Flash first.
4. Use the default partitioning on /dev/sda.
5. Tell the installer to mount /dev/sdb1 as /space, but not partition it
6. Install the default Ubuntu Server. Add the OpenSSH package, but no others.
7. When logged in to the new system, edit /etc/network/interfaces to have the correct static IP address. Edit /etc/resolv.conf to have the right DNS server and search domain (copy from an existing machine)
8. ifdown eth0; ifup eth0 to use the new configuration
9. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to use the media lab Ubuntu mirror, since that is faster.
10. apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
11. With the base system installed, install the "important" packages above.
12. Fix automount to start at boot: update-rc.d am-utils defaults (Ubuntu bug filed: hopefully this will be unneeded in the future)
13. Uncomment the line server pool.ntp.org in /etc/ntp.conf to get more accurate NTP synchronization.
14. copy home directories from a backup
15. Remove shadow passwords (needed for PMG stuff): pwunconv
16. Copy passwd file to passwd.base. This gets used to produce the "real" passwd file, by adding users to it: cp /etc/passwd /etc/passwd.base
17. Edit /etc/passwd.base to remove any user accounts. You can store any local passwords in /etc/passwd.local
18. Install the PMG scripts and accounts:

cd /
curl http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/internal/new-pmg.tar.gz | tar xzf -
/usr/local/adm/bin/updatemachine

Installing AFS

The following procedure builds an AFS module package specific for the kernel being used on the system. This package can be used on other systems, provided that they have the same kernel. This can save some time on other systems.

1. sudo apt-get install openafs-krb5 openafs-client krb5-user module-assistant
2. Accept the defaults. Set the AFS cell to csail.mit.edu
3. sudo module-assistant prepare
4. sudo module-assistant auto-install openafs
5. sudo /etc/init.d/openafs-client restart

Installing Matlab

These directions are stolen from [1]

mkdir /space/matlab
cp /space/backup*/space/matlab7.4/etc/license.dat /space/matlab
cd /space/backup*/space/matlab-download*
./install -t
        (probably don't need -t: -t only necessary when X is not available...)
a       (accept license)
/space/matlab   (where the install should go)
c       (continue)
y       (make links)
        (/usr/local/bin is fine)
y       (begin installation)
matlab  (test it minimally)
quit